But take that rotor and put it in space - or other convenient vacuum
- and leave the swashplate 'uncorrected', the blades will follow the pitch change rods faithfully but without the phase lag.
I don't understand. Why would the blades move at all? They're in a vacuum. There's no lift to cause displacement. Pitch/AOA would have no effect.
Maybe you're talking about my imaginary setup of pushrods that go to the center of the blade root (instead of in front or behind) so as to push it up or pull it down directly, instead of controlling pitch/AOA. This would displace them in a vacuum, and there would be a 90 degree phase lag force.
(How much of this lagged force results in lag of displacement, depends on the elasticity of the blades, the mounting, etc., just like the toy gyro in your fingers with varying strength of grasp. (Except the former is more likely to rip out of the mounting and cause catastrophic damage to the vacuum chamber and building.) But put a U-joint in the shaft, and no problem you're golden. Unimpeded 90 degree precession.)
No aerodynamics = no flapping
Completely untrue, consider the spacecraft in orbit. 90 degree phase lag.
because a gyro doesn't do this - the shaft axis is the rotors spin axis, the other terms are apparent in that they are used to describe the apparent shift in the axis to explain things like Hookes joint effect.
You presented that "a gyro [...] takes its spin axis with it" as a difference between gyros and rotors. I pointed out that they both do this, so this difference doesn't exist.
Now you're presenting that "the shaft axis is the rotors spin axis" as a necessary feature of gyros that separates them from rotors. But this isn't a difference either, because it's false. See the cardboard on the pencil gyro video, where the spin axis was displaced from the shaft axis. Like a rotor.
BTW - if you took self-stated credentials at face value on the internet you would make far more assumptions and mistakes than explaining basics to check understanding - 'working on rotor analysis' covers a multitude of disciplines such as vibration analysis which looks more at mass and dynamic balancing than aero issues. It wasn't meant as a snub to MeddleMoe.
Actually you're right. At the slightest gray area of interpretation, it's better to err toward including more detail rather than less. No snub.
But, again, do you think we're saying that any force other than lift is applied to the rotor?